Hasta siempre, Che Guevara

On this day in 1967, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was executed by the Bolivian army on the orders of the CIA.

Guevara the man was deeply flawed and far from a saint. But to millions, Guevara is not a man, he is an idea epitomising resistance to oppression. The romantic freedom fighter. Nothing encapsulates that notion better than his (perhaps apocryphal) last words:

I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man

A fictionalised version of of his death appears in the opening chapter of my novel, Children of the Sunset. Not as a tribute to the man. But a recognition of the truth of those words. That you can kill a man. But you can’t kill an idea.

This guy killed a lot of people. He was a coward and a murderer. His last words begging for his life: “Please don´t kill me, please don´t kill me, I’m worth more alive than dead”. He was sent to “fight” or bug in Bolivia because the “nice” Castro brothers wanted to get rid of him because he was a shame and a “problem”. Someone said he was a medical doctor, but no records were ever found that he studied medicine. And if this was true, I never imagined a medical doctor killing people because they had different thoughts.